Chiming in to give big ups to the** goddess** for nailing the high hard one.
I hope I can still say the following:
I am for the death penalty, but in this case I think they should have to wear a silly costume when executed.
Like deeley-whopper antennas? It might be fun to see that Jacob’s Ladder effect at the electrocution.
Wonderful OP goddess , this has peeved at me before, but I’ve always just disregarded it when I’ve come across it here.
MBG - Against the death penalty all the time, yes even for YOU.
Is it hypocritical to say that you are against the death penalty, but feel that [insert particular crime here] was so heinous that giving anything less than the maximum penalty the law allows would be a miscarriage of justice? Because that’s how I feel about Couey. His crime was so bad that it deserves the most severe punishment that the society he lives in can dish out and where he lives, that’s the death penalty - but if the death penalty was repealed before he was sentenced, life in prison became the new maximum penalty and that’s what he got, then I’d be content.
I don’t feel the death penalty is right, but to have it on the books and then give this man a lesser sentence is to suggest that his crime somehow felt short of being one of the worst things a human being can do to another.
…a silly costume and really ugly shoes.
But the outcome of what happens to the imprisoned isn’t based on what any individual wishes for them. And who says they are irredeemable – even if they never leave that prison?
I agree with you about torture and don’t wish it on anyone.
goddess, I don’t think this is minor at all. Good OP.
Nah, it’s not. Just a safety valve of sorts, for those rare instances when my emotions lead me to contemplate that being motivated by a desire for vengeance might be acceptably within my personal ethos. It helps to remind myself that the DP fails at that, and why.
The point to punishment and suffering? I get no charge out of knowing that someone is suffering, and I don’t believe we should make it a point to include suffering in criminal penalties. That said, society as a whole still has a right and a duty to protect its members from the depredations of unredeemed fuckwits. I happen to hold as an article of faith that truly irredeemable ones exist as such only to the extent that they choose to be irredeemable. And as long as they remain capable of conscious thought, they retain the power to choose otherwise.
Strange bedfellows in here…
…but move over. I’m getting in, too. Jsgoddess is absolutely right. That’s not all that bothers me about those threads, but it’s a big part of it. I don’t like rubber-necking, and I don’t like hand-wringing over the cauldron.
But what happens when the Hell’s Angels and the Rock Machine get into a gang war? If the limits are just based on per capita, then essentially HA/RM get the message that after a certain number of murders, they get a discount for the subsequent murders: “First 10 murders this year are capital, after that, life.”
That tells HA/RM commit more of their murders towards the end of the year to get the discount…
YES. How can you be against the death penalty and still call for it without being a hypocrite? I mean, I try not to criticize people for their emotions, but you’d have to admit there’s an obvious contradiction here.
I agree completely with the OP. Those comments (although I understand that a lot of the time, they’re just venting) reak of trying to have it both ways - “I’m principled and against the death penalty” but also “I’m outraged and wish to join the angry mob!”
Huh. Instead of Pharmaprix cards, they could have Pharma-Killings-Prix cards.
Zoe, I wasn’t speaking to a general utility of life prison sentences. Just for that single argument for replacing the death penalty with life without parole sentencing. I believe there are a number of excellent reasons to oppose the death penalty as it is being implemented here in the US. It’s that one single arguement that pisses me off.
As for whether lifers may or may not be irredeemable, it’s certainly not an absolute. Certainly there have been death row inmates who have redeemed themselves. From what I recall at the time, Karla Faye Tucker may have been an example of this. There’s always a chance to make lemonade if one applies oneself, I think.
Good OP. My wife often tries to goad me into this one. She’s as staunchly pro-DP and I am anti, and every now and then she’ll bring up a particularly heinous case, and try the “Well, you’d be ok with the DP in this case, right?”. As always, wrong. It doesn’t matter what they do, it doesn’t matter who or how many they kill – killing them is just as wrong.
I’ve always felt that every time a federal prisoner is executed, I, as a citizen of this country, bear a portion of that responsibility. And I don’t appreciate my government forcing some knucklehead’s blood onto my hands.
I’ll often hear “Well, if it were your daughter who was killed, you’d feel differently about it”. Well, first of all, fuck you and your insinuation that anyone with an anti-DP viewpoint is a hypocrite. But more importantly, of course I’d feel differently about that particular case, but I wouldn’t want that killer’s blood on the hands of any other citizen, just like I don’t want the blood that is occasionally forced onto mine. Just because I wouldn’t want a state-sanctioned murder doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pay off whoever I had to to make damn well sure the guy who did this wasn’t shived a year or so down the road.
Has anyone ever done a study on “closure?” Are victim’s families in non-DP states & nations suffering from unresolved grief, vs families of victims whose killers were executed, living as more mentally healthy survivors?
I agree with this and I’m also against the death penalty. I rarely read the baby killer/murder threads or comment. I have to admit that when I hear about something truly horrible I sometimes privately wonder if the person deserves to breath one more drop of air. Since I’m never chosen for jury duty and it doesn’t change my opinion about the death penalty, I guess it’s just venting on my part.
I remember several years ago reading about a women that was taken hostage at a car wash. They took her to an ATM and both men raped her. They took her to the edge of a cliff and while she was standing there they both discussed how to kill her. They threw her off the cliff and saw that she wasn’t dead so they drug her back up and threw her off the cliff again.
Thinking about what this poor woman went through and imagining what her parents go through reliving what happened to her made me wish they would die.
It’s not that some murderers don’t deserve to die, but it’s not the way our justice system should work. But I can cheerfully hope that something terrible happens to them.
Bravo! I’m anti-DP and heartily approve of this pitting.
Those “I’m against the DP but this crime is just so heinous I hope he gets eviscerated and fed to the jackals” posts sicken me too. But it’s not just 'cause they’re hypocritical – truth is, I don’t think they mean it. They know whatever they say on a message board has no meaning in real life, and nothing they say will really punish the perpetrator. Thus they’re free to spew their venom at the latest grief-fest article someone found in the East Bumfuck Online Gazette.
These paper tigers love to go on the hunt for such news items and threads. They congregate in the topic with the morbid, horrified delight of vacationers on a tour of celebrity death sites, wanking to their beloved outrage porn before rushing to outdo one another in paroxysms of noxious self-righteousness and vicarious, sadistic glee.
So, uh, yeah. Well done, jsgoddess.
Exactly.
If someone in my family was murdered, i’d probably want to kill the murderer myself. But my visceral feelings, arising out of personal loss and anguish and anger, would not be a suitable basis for deciding the person’s penalty.
And that is precisely why we don’t leave these decisions to the victim’s family and friends.
I agree 100% with the op.
In fact it reminds me of the old joke:
A guy and a girl are parked in lover’s lane.
he asks her if she would have sex with him for $1,000,000. She thinks for about 1 second and says “sure”.
So then he asks if she would have sex with him for $10.
Shocked and upset she says “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“We have already established that, now we are just haggling over price.”
Hear! And hear!
And your pitting is most definitely **not ** minor.
Spot on. Well said.
Ditto, me too, ‘what he said’…etc…My bolding of Hal’s words. There it is, in a nutshell.
Thanks Hal!